Abstract
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Europeans invented “Indians” and populated the world with them.
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Notes
Shankar Raman, Framing “India”: The Colonial Imaginary in Early Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 83. Raman’s work is a shaping influence on this volume’s understanding of Indography.
All references to Shakespeare are to Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard, and Katharine Eisaman Maus, eds., The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd ed. (New York: Norton, 2007).
Rebecca Ann Bach, Colonial Transformations: The Cultural Production of the New Atlantic World (London and New York: Palgrave, 2000), 180.
Michel de Certeau, “Ethno-Graphy,” in Certeau, The Writing of History, trans. Tom Conley (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 209–243.
Edward W. Said, in Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979), considers the structural principles organizing European “knowledge” about the Orient, but his focus is the Arab world rather than India.
See, for example, Andre Gunder Frank, Re-Orient: Global Economy in the Asian Age (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).
The term “contact zone” was popularized by Mary Louise Pratt; see her article, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession 91 (1991): 33–40. Early modern scholars have adapted the term to a variety of ends: see in particular the essays in Section II of Jyotsna G. Singh, ed., A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Age of Expansion (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010). Singh herself has used the term to think about issues of linguistic translation: see her as-yet unpublished essay, “Jahangir’s Mughal Court as a ‘Contact Zone’: Translation and Traffic in Early Anglo-Muslim Encounters,” presented at the conference on the Seaborne Renaissance at the University of Texas, Austin, on February 6, 2010.
My discussion here refers to the following editions: Herodotus, The Histories, ed. John M. Marincola, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996); J. W. McCrindle, ed., Ancient India as Described by Megasthenes and Arian (London: Trubner, 1877);
Arrian, Anabasis of Alexander, Books V–VII: Indica, trans. P. A. Brunt (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983);
and Pliny the Elder, The Natural History: A Selection, ed. John F. Healey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). For a study of classical Indography,
see Grant Parker, The Making of Roman India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 10.
My discussion here refers to the following editions: Marco Polo, The Travels, ed. Ronald Latham (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958),
and Sir John Mandeville, The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, trans. C. W. R. D. Moseley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984).
For a discussion of both writers as part of a tradition of writing about India that extends to the American New World, see Mary Baine Campbell, The Witness and the Other World: The Exotic and European Travel Writing, 400–1600 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991).
Christopher Columbus, The Four Voyages: Being His Own Log-Book, Letters and Dispatches with Connecting Narratives, trans. J. M. Cohen (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), 72–73. Bartolomé de Las Casas wrote that “Oían Cubanacan y… entendíanlo muy al revés y aplicábanlo que hablaban del Gran Can,” in Historia de las Indias, ed. André Saint-Lu (Caracas: Biblioteca Ayacucho, 1986 [1561]), 229.
For discussions of the medieval notion of translatio imperii in relation to European fantasies of empire and New World writing, see Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: From The Tempest to Tarzan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997),
and Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Hugo Grotius, On the Origin of the Native Races of America: A Dissertation, trans. Edmund Goldsmid (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1885 [1542]), 19. Grotius argues that North American “Indians,” however, are of Norse descent.
Walter Ralegh, The Discovery of Guiana (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing, 2004), 49.
Nina L. Etkin, Foods of Association: Biocultural Perspectives on Foods and Beverages that Mediate Socialbility (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2009), 21. I am grateful to Elisabeth Bass for drawing my attention to Etkin’s work.
John Donne, The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 80.
See Stelio Cro, “Classical Antiquity, America, and the Myth of the Noble Savage,” in The Classical Tradition and the Americas, ed. Wolfgang Haase and Meyer Reinhold, vol. 1 (Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1993), 379–418.
John Milton, Paradise Lost, and John Leonard, ed., The Complete Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), IV.162–163, II.638–640. I thank Laura Feigin for drawing my attention to Milton’s “spicy” imaginary.
All references are to John Fletcher, The Island Princess, in Fredson Bowers, ed., The Dramatic Works in the Beaumont and Fletcher Canon, 10 vols., vol. 5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–1996).
I expand on this in Jonathan Gil Harris, Marvelous Repossessions: Globalization, The Tempest , and the Waking Dream of Paradise (Vancouver, BC: Ronsdale Press, 2012).
Jean de Léry, History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil, Otherwise Called America, trans. Janet Whatley (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 177.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 8.
“The Masquers appear in a maritime chariot, made of a spungy rockstuff mixt with shells, sea-weeds, coral, and pearl, borne upon an axletree with golden wheels” (see William Davenant, The Triumph of Love, in The Dramatic Works of Sir William Davenant, ed. James Maidment and W. H. Logan, vol.1 [Edinburgh: William Patterson, 1872], 300; see also Amrita Sen’s essay in this volume).
On pearls in early modern American rather than eastern settings, see Charles Frey, “The Tempest and The New World,” Shakespeare Quarterly 30 (1979): 29–41.
Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 47–92.
Harriot, Briefe and True Report, 25, 45; see James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 196–199.
I have used the text of Ralph Fitch’s account of his travels in India reproduced in William Foster, ed., Early Travels in India 1583–1619 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), 8–47, especially 15, 14, 21–22. Fitch’s use of post-Reformation religious terminology is complicated by his indebtedness to the Venetian merchant Cesar Federici’s account of his travels to India, published in Venice in 1587 and, in an English translation by Thomas Hickock, in London the following year.
For a thoughtful discussion of Othello’s infamous crux as the basis of a cultural palimpsest that plays out in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh, a novel set partly in the Jewish community of Cochin in Kerala, India, see Jonathan Greenberg, “‘The Base Indian’ or ‘The Base Judean’?: Othello and the Metaphor of the Palimpsest in Salman Rushdie’s The Moor’s Last Sigh,” Modern Language Studies 29 (1999): 93–107.
Mary Floyd-Wilson, English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “The Puzzle of the American Climate in the Early Colonial Period,” The American Historical Review 87 (1982): 1262–1289, especially 1265.
Michael H. Fisher, ed., Beyond the Three Seas: Travellers’ Tales of Mughal India (New Delhi: Random House India, 2007), 103.
Pietro della Valle, The Travels of Pietro della Valle in India: From the Old English Translation of 1664, by G. Havers, 2 vols., ed. Edward Grey (London: Hakluyt Society, 1892), I. 172.
Karen Ordahl Kupperman, “Fear of Hot Climates in the Anglo-American Colonial Experience,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (1984): 213–240.
See Sujata Iyengar, Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Richard Hakluyt, “The Voyage and Travel of M. Caesar Fredericke, Marchant of Venice, into the East India, and Beyond the Indies,” The Principal Navigations, vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1955), 365–449, especially 391.
Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Vanita Seth, Europe’s India n s: Producing Racial Difference, 1500 –1900 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), especially 1–59.
See Benjamin Braude, “The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” Constructing Race: Differentiating Peoples in the Early Modern World, William and Mary Quarterly 54 (1997): 103–142.
See Ania Loomba and Jonathan Burton, eds., Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion (London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
See, for example, the essays in Henry Veltmeyer, ed., New Perspectives on Globalization and Antiglobalization: Prospects for a New World Order? (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008).
Amitav Ghosh, In an Antique Land: History in the Guise of a Traveler’s Tale (New York: Vintage, 1992).
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Harris, J.G. (2012). Introduction. In: Harris, J.G. (eds) Indography. Signs of Race. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137090768_1
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